Author: Jesse Landry

They say AI isn’t here to replace engineers, it’s here to augment them. That’s the polite version. What surfaced at ELC’s July 10 roundtable was something else entirely. This wasn’t your usual talking-heads panel. This was a wide-open signal flare across engineering leadership: the AI era isn’t coming, it’s already refactoring how teams ship, scale, and structure. When Santha Nandakumar hosts a session, the energy shifts. She doesn’t just facilitate, she calibrates the room. Decades of engineering leadership at Capital One, Movius, PRGX, and Lavante give her the range. Now, as an executive coach at Tandem, she’s helping engineering leaders…

The AI boom has been loud. The quantum whisper? That’s been SandboxAQ, quietly building something so advanced, most folks don’t even know how far behind they already are. Started inside Alphabet back in 2016 as an internal skunkworks lab, SandboxAQ spun out in 2022 with a mission that reads like science fiction, but executes like enterprise-grade SaaS. Quantum resistant cryptography? Check. Physics-based AI simulations that model molecular interactions faster than your GPU can blink? Check. Navigation systems that work without GPS by reading the Earth’s magnetic fingerprint like a mixtape? Yeah, that too. And now, fresh off a $95 million…

xAI, the brainchild of Elon Musk, just pulled a $10 billion move that doesn’t whisper confidence, it roars. A blend of $5 billion in debt and $5 billion in equity, led by Morgan Stanley, backed by usual suspects like Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, BlackRock, Fidelity, and some of the heaviest hitters in sovereign wealth, Qatar Investment Authority, Oman Investment Authority, and Kingdom Holding Company. Oh, and SpaceX casually threw in $2 billion in strategic equity, keeping the whole operation disturbingly in the family. This isn’t just a funding round. It’s a recalibration of what scale means in AI. With a…

If you’ve ever run a go-to-market team, you know the drill: Sales hits the gas, marketing tries to steer, ops holds the map upside down, and everyone’s blaming the CRM. Now imagine giving that chaos a neural upgrade. That’s exactly what Unify just pulled off, landing a $40M Series B to hardwire AI into the bloodstream of outbound sales. This wasn’t a lucky bounce or a soft lob, this was precision execution. Battery Ventures led the round with heavy hitters like OpenAI Startup Fund, Thrive Capital, Emergence Capital, Abstract Ventures, The Cannon Project, and Capital49 backing the signal. That’s not…

The term “black box” used to mean your code was airtight. Today? It’s a polite way of saying “I don’t know what the hell is going on in there.” That’s the mess modern DevOps teams are sitting in, an ever-expanding sprawl of tools, services, cloud infrastructure, and mystery workloads no one really owns. And into that chaos comes Crash Override, not with another dashboard to ignore, but with the world’s first Engineering Relationship Management platform, a full-spectrum visibility engine for code-to-cloud reality. Founded in 2022 by two of security’s most seasoned war dogs, John Viega and Mark Curphey, Crash Override…

There’s “stable,” and then there’s Agora stable, and judging by their $50M Series A led by Paradigm, we’re talking the kind of stability that Wall Street suits wish their balance sheets had. Founded in late 2023, Agora isn’t trying to be another “insert coin here” project that disappears faster than a Solana meme token during a congestion spike. This crew, Nick van Eck (CEO), Drake Evans (CTO), and Joe McGrady (COO), built a platform that doesn’t just mint stablecoins, it institutionalizes them. Think of Agora as the AWS of stablecoin issuance: a white-label infrastructure that lets enterprises go live in…

Felt just pulled in another $15 million, and if you think it’s “just another funding round,” you’re still stuck booting up legacy GIS from a Windows 7 laptop in a fluorescent-lit cubicle. Felt isn’t mapping the world, they’re rebuilding how we think about it. From the ground up, in real time, through a browser, with the kind of design that makes your old GIS interface look like it was coded during dial-up. And this raise? It’s not about hype. It’s fuel to build the AI native spatial stack enterprises didn’t know they needed, until now. Let’s talk brass tacks. Energize…

Dakota just raised $12.5 million. But this isn’t about the money. It’s about the system that needed fixing, and the team that finally called its bluff. Crossborder payments today move like a fax machine stuck in molasses, slow, opaque, overpriced, and powered by infrastructure that predates the Backstreet Boys. Try wiring funds to Singapore on a Friday and you’ll be lucky if they land before your next dental cleaning. Enter Dakota, the New York-based fintech that didn’t come to play cute with banking UX; they came to make the rails run clean, global, and on-chain. Founded in October 2022 and…

What do you get when a PhD chemical engineer with 30+ years in the battery game decides he’s done waiting on offshore supply chains and vaporware promises? You get Ultion Technologies. And no, it’s not a Marvel villain, it’s a Nevada-based battery force now armed with Series A firepower and a mission to power America’s energy future, from the grid to the battlefield. Founded in December 2021 by Dr. Johnnie Stoker, yes, the same Stoker who co-founded K2 Energy and scaled it into a serious LFP contender, Ultion Technologies is built like a cell from the inside out: tight, durable,…

Ammonia. A word most folks still associate with cleaning products or high school chemistry labs, not 300 kW trucks or tugboats that don’t belch black smoke into the ocean breeze. But Amogy Inc. saw it differently. Where others saw a smelly molecule, they saw energy density, infrastructure maturity, and a path to burn the carbon without burning the planet. Founded in late 2020 by a crew of MIT PhDs who apparently didn’t get the memo that clean energy had to be incremental and polite, Amogy’s been coming for the hard-to-abate sectors with the force of a freight train, fueled by…